I've been an entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I started selling cool rocks even before I sold lemonade. At age 8, I hired my two friends to deliver newspapers and gave them 75 cents a day, and I kept 25 cents. I've gone on to start much larger companies, divisions within companies, both within the US and outside, that have led to both success and failure. Venture backed, partnerships, bootstrapped, high growth, retail, commercial real estate, technology, energy, B2B, B2C, B20 - nobody is there to buy) and more. I’ve learned my greatest life and business lessons from my failures. I recently completed a book for Wiley & Sons, entitled The 7 Non Negotiables of Winning: Tying Soft Traits to Hard Results, which you can read about here: http://www.7nns.com. My current company, Fishbowl, is a culmination of everything I’ve learned over my 30-plus business years.

What Will Your SEO Look Like In 2013? (The Experts Weigh In)

“The SEO’s job, in my opinion, should have no boundaries other than ‘What are the things that positively influence this cycle?’ ‘What are the things that will help you achieve your goals?’ I don’t care if someone says, ‘Well, UI/UX, that is completely outside the realm of SEO. Usability, that’s outside the realm. Web page speed, page load speed–that is the department of software engineering and web development. That’s not an SEO’s job.’”

“Screw that. No, it is the SEO’s job. If it positively impacts this process, it is now a part of our jobs.” – Rand Fishkin, CEO SEOMoz

In today’s column I want to address the functional topic of SEO—an art and science that is at the very core of Fishbowl‘s existence. One of our marketing managers, Ryan Long, gave me some interesting perspective about what the future of SEO will hold in 2013:

“In the recent ‘Whiteboard Friday’ video What’s Really Included in An SEO’s Job?, from SEOMoz CEO Rand Fishkin, he mentions things like webpage load speed, which traditionally falls outside the job of an SEO,” Long said. “However, since load time can impact SEO ranking, he suggests it become a concern for the SEO. The SEO should step beyond the traditional boundary and work with the web development team, to help ensure that in addition to their other objectives, they’re able to support the strongest possible SEO.”

Says Fishkin, “Anyone’s job, no matter what your position, is about being effective at accomplishing your [company’s] goals.” Long notes that as we move into 2013, SEOs should worry less about staying within boundaries, and should devote more attention to working dynamically and creatively with the other functions surrounding our traditional role to achieve our desired results.

Ryan Long, Fishbowl SEO

I fully agree. This is an approach that maps strongly with our 7 Non Negotiables principles as well, which I’ve been writing about in a number of columns, of late.

But as it pertains to SEO, let’s look a little further at what Rand Fishkin and several other regional and national experts have to say about how the SEO role will be evolving for successful companies during 2013:

You should know the goals of your marketing campaign first. Then ask: How can search traffic and rankings help achieve them? You want to figure out how do the search rankings actually affect and achieve the marketing goals, rather than just trying to get traffic. Now we know how search affects that. Then, we’re going to figure out what inputs affect the success of your SEO?

Then you derive the list of what should be included in the SEO’s job.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz (photo courtesy of SEOmoz.org)

Whether you get to have direct impact or whether it’s indirect impact and you have to work with other people across teams, those should be the things on your list. If UI/UX is holding back the achievement of the marketing goals and the search rankings that can help get you there, then you need to work on that. Same story with speed. Same story with accessibility or responsive design, with content strategy, with branding, with press and PR, public relations.

Our job is to positively impact the items that are going to influence our goals. If SEOs have to do things that are outside of the classic SEO job description to achieve a goal, they should do it. That’s what makes a great SEO. That’s what makes a great professional in any field, someone who accomplishes the goals, not someone who checks tasks off on a list.

I’ve been quoted before about SEO dying. I still believe that the industry as we know it will be dead in about 1.5 years. My vision of what SEO will morph into will revolve around marketers being able to target very specific groups of people with their marketing message; whether it be on a social network, a search engine, an app, or a game. If you take that approach a step further (which we pretty much already have) you should be able to target individual people wherever they are and whatever they’re doing online.

Adam Torkildson, SEO Champion

The job of an SEO will turn into the job of ‘ranking’ their content for the exact person on FacebookFacebook who is looking for their product/service. For example, someone on GoogleGoogle who is searching on ‘Death of SEO‘ comes across a Forbes article ranked #1 for that phrase, and they find you. Or someone in the App store looking for the top productivity app, and your job is now to rank the app as highly as possible through reviews, downloads, and social “like” signals.

In summary, my motto is ‘It’s Who You Rank For, Not What You Rank For.’ In the coming season, you should take the focus away from simply targeting keyword phrases (when at least 50% of the time the phrase doesn’t let us know what the searchers intent even is). You should focus more on getting your (great) content in front of the right consumer wherever they are, socially, organically, and mobile-ly (I made that word up—but it should be clear what I mean). In summary—welcome to a very new kind of job.

Jameson Bates, SEO for Leadgenix, weighs in with the following points:

The debate about the term “SEOer” has been going on for some time. Do I do SEO, or am I an online marketer? Honestly, the term SEO is fast becoming a generic trademark in that when people say “SEO” they are likely referring to online marketing or overall online performance—which, coincidentally, is how I view the SEO role.

Jameson Bates, SEO for Leadgenix

In regards to a concrete definition for SEO, the conversation usually stops at link acquisition and content creation (two very important aspects of the process). However, my conversations with clients will typically go far beyond. My clients come to me for help, sometimes like beggars with open hands looking for everything I can give them. Because I feel personally responsible to them for their success, I try to give them everything I can. At that point, my role evolves to include User Interface design (UI) and User experience (UX). These are not my areas of superior expertise or training, but it is currently vital for SEO to help clients understand at least the foundational principals to consider in both of those areas.

In 2013, the SEO Role must go above and beyond. For example, a basic SEO strategy would obviously include some amount of reporting (for keyword rankings and traffic numbers at the least); however, I find myself analyzing the data to help my client better understand their demographic. Where are visitors accessing the site from, when do they access the site, and what are they specifically looking for when they are on the site? All of these questions—and more—are in hopes of helping them identify new ways to effectively reach their customer base and ultimately make them more successful. It is SEO’s job to provide meaningful help.

Marketing for me is about perpetually thinking outside of the box. When you look at it objectively, marketing–specifically online marketing–is a fairly standardized set of practices with standard if/then statements. For example, if the company has a location, then do Local SEO. If the company has a simple product, then engage clients in the social media space. However, each client is unique, as is every customer base. This means that each new company an SEO addresses will increasingly present (or even require) the opportunity for providers to come up with new or evolving approaches, and we’ll generally need to meet these new challenges pretty much on the fly.

Josh Steimle, CEO of Utah-Based SEO firm MWI has these insights to share:

Wayne Gretzky was a great hockey player because he didn’t skate to where the puck was; he skated to where it was going to be. Over the past year we’ve seen a separation between the SEO professionals who were focused on what search was, and those SEOs who knew where it was going. Last year SEO was about building links and improving rankings, or at least many SEOs thought that it was, and they got killed by the Google Penguin and Pandaupdates.

Josh Steimle, CEO of SEO firm MWI, Inc.

Any SEO worth his stuff knows, and should have known well before now, that Google is becoming more and more like a human being. If you, as a human, can look at a link and say “That’s a spammy link,” you can be pretty well assured Google will figure it out also. If you look at a page of content and say “This makes no sense to me. This might get good rankings on Google, but it doesn’t do a thing for me as a human being;” Google will figure that out as well. Too many SEOs have said, “Hey, I know it’s spam, but it works, so let’s keep on doing it.” They’re the ones who got hosed. Good SEOs recognized where Google was going years ago and focused on integration with quality content through public relations, high-quality links, and high-quality content, even though it meant they were more expensive and were losing work to the lower-priced, spam-focused SEOs and SEO firms. Now the good SEOs are being vindicated.

Rand has it exactly right–links and rankings are just means to an end, not the end itself. What clients really want is not better rankings and more links; they want to make more money. The SEOs who understood and understand where Google is going and what their clients really want are the ones who are still in business and doing well. For them, the job of a SEO is content relevancy (public relations), user experience, web design, conversions, traffic segmentation, call tracking, research, writing, and anything else that sells products and services and leads to more profits for the client not just short-term, but long-term as well.

Most of all, the job of an SEO is to see the future. Those who can’t will go out of business and take their clients with them. (Author’s personal note – Wow! Well said, Josh!)

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I love that quote too, Ryan. It is very much in alignment with the 7 N N’s. You are absolutely right about the power of full commitment to the outcome of a function, as opposed to just marching through the specific checkmarks of your particular “job”. Thanks so much for your note – and extra thanks for all of your contributions to this article. What a great and timely topic. Regards, David

Great article! I’m excited to see the shift from link creation and curating to a more end-user, content aware web. That type of customer engagement will really lead to the end-all be-all of increasing the bottom line of companies.

The roles and job duties of web developers and SEO engineers continue to merge! If you want to be really good at either web development or SEO, you should understand and continually keep up to date with both!